Travel / Jamaica

The Best Thing About Living in Jamaica, Part 4

Farmers’ Markets, Comfort Zones and Giving a Bit of Yourself Back

I have been living in Kingston, Jamaica since June of 2021. Arriving in this place from a large, chaotic, hot city in a developing country on the coast of East Africa, it sometimes feels like a relief to be here. But Kingston is also described in the same way, sometimes — excluding the East Africa part — but definitely including the traffic part.

I love living here and am writing about it a bit, as a non-Jamaican who has only scratched the surface of this great country.

This is the fourth article in this series, and if you are interested in reading the first 3, you will find them at the bottom of this article.

I consider myself lucky, as a foreigner, to be able to experience this place not as a tourist or a traveller, but as someone who gets to live here for a while and soak it up as much as possible. The place intrigues me because I have found that it doesn’t throw its arms around you right away. There’s a waiting game first, a bit of a dance. It waits a bit for you to get to know each other and only when you are ready will it show itself to you. But you will have to be willing to go and find it.

There are endless trips to do. Backwoods dirt roads to a jungle waterfall, lunch at your favourite jerk chicken stand, spending an afternoon at a sugar estate sipping rum, getting a boat out to a makeshift bar on stilts out on a sandbar in the middle of the Caribbean, off the south coast of Treasure Beach.

They are all moments of greatness.

But the other day, I had the opportunity that was a bit less excursion-focused, a bit less about personal pleasure seeking surrounding food and drinking, not so much about sight seeing.

I participated in a Farmers’ Market — as a producer and not as a consumer (although I did consume, quite happily). You know the kind — tents, tables, wares, organic, fresh, hand made, kindred spirits etc. It was not without a little bit of trepidation and definitely a bit of nervousness. I’ve been to many of them and always wondered if I could do that too. But this was my first time taking part in one and being able to find a bit of success in it is just another thing that this country has given me.

The way that I felt when I left the house yesterday morning with my boxes of wares, a cooler full of ice and a hand drawn sign was the same way that I felt when I published my first article on Medium (and still do when I publish now, to some extent). Nervous excitement. Is this gonna work? This is good, right? Is this a dumb idea? What will people think? What if no one likes it? What if I’m ignored? Will the comments be good? What does success look like? Who decides? What if, what if, what if…?

But once committed, it had to be done. There would be no turning back.

When I write an article, I assemble my thoughts and try, as entertainingly and engagingly as possible, to put myself….out there.

It’s the same way with banana bread, as it turns out. You put it all together, put your own little touch to it, bake and put it on display on a table. And at that point, it’s out there. It’s not really yours anymore, it belongs to the person who (hopefully) will buy it.

The feedback, just as it is on Medium, is all very immediate.

For the record, I did make banana bread — 10 tins of it. I made not too sweet sorrel juice — 10 bottles of it. I made sweet ginger juice — 10 bottles of it. It was impossible to know ahead of time how much to make, but then I asked myself, “what would success look like?” and came up with these round numbers.

I spent much of Wednesday in the kitchen and decided that if I could sell half of these, that would be a good day. The rest I could take home and we’d happily eat and drink them later. That could also qualify as a good day.

But they all sold.

And by 3pm I was sold out and packed up and headed for home with a pocketful of cash.

Again, it felt like an article on Medium. It was the same as the first time you get a comment on an article, the first time you get a follower, the first time you look at your daily totals and see $0.12 in your account.

And you think to yourself, hmmmm…..maybe this could be something. I can’t wait to do it again.

Like writing online and living abroad, participating in a farmers’ market has the potential to open new doors for me and I don’t just mean the immediate and physical ones, as an expat, living in Jamaica. I mean the ones inside my own mind.

Here are a few that sprung to mind over the course of the day:

1. I was presented with an opportunity that I would not necessarily ever have taken advantage of at home. I mean, I suppose I could have looked into it. But would I have ever done it? Probably not. Being abroad just makes you more open to the possibilities. And to asking yourself the question, “why not?”

2. I took the opportunity to try something new, something I never done before but always wondered about. They say that’s how you stay young. Thus inspired, I might just go bungee jumping tomorrow. Thankfully, it doesn’t exist on the island.

3. It got me out of my comfort zone. Just like writing on Medium and living abroad does. It is true that fear keeps us rooted and so do the questions (detailed above) that many of us ask ourselves each time we do something so public as this. Sometimes, you really do need to say “fuck it” and bake the hell out of that banana bread.

4. I created something instead of consuming, using my own creativity. It is very important to me that even though I am not a local (yet), that all the products that I used in my products were local. I would be part of the problem as opposed to the solution if I used anything imported. The fact that people enjoyed it and were even willing to pay for something I made was icing on the cake.

5. I was able to contribute something to the community. The interaction that I had with people asking questions was great. It became clear to me that they are buying the story behind it as well as the product itself. The conversations with the other vendors was its own reward.

In the end, like writing on Medium, it was and is a good experience. To stretch the similarity one step further, I am probably not going to be able to retire quite yet on my take from yesterday…much like Medium. However, that’s not the point.

Once we decide why we are doing this, we can decide for ourselves what success looks like. And then the rest is easy.

And it also answers that question that is always rattling around inside my brain, “How can I be less of an expat in this place?”

Here are links to a few related articles

Having privilege has certainly opened doors for me while living abroad the past 7 years. These are some realisations that have occurred to me about the difference in motivation, experience and expectations in being an expat and being an immigrant.

Previous articles on the topic include some of the nuts and bolts of living life as an expat here.

Here is Part 1 of this series on the topic of Jerk Chicken and our favourite place to get it.

Part 2, on a road trip to Reggae Falls in St Thomas parish (insert)

Part 3, on a road trip to the Worthy Park Sugar Estate in St Catherine parish

And finally, if you want to make your own ginger beer…..